There’s been some discussion on Facebook and Discord about the SSSR Labs Matrixarchate, which is a pretty nifty audio module for making drastic patching changes quickly using a patch matrix. It supports save and recall of settings to 60 different storage locations, and selection of saved patches via a trigger input or via the i2c bus.

There’s obviously been a lot of interest on whether this module can be used for video. The patch matrix is implemented with unbuffered I/O and a switch IC (the MT8816AE) that makes passive high-bandwidth connections, and indeed the datasheet for the IC calls out video as one of the intended applications.

Using the module in practice, with complex sources (e.g. live cameras) it appears to work more or less okay with video. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it doesn’t pass the oscilloscope test and it will blur your crisp edges. I finally upgraded my home studio scope so I didn’t have to lug modules to the lab for testing. Here’s a Prismatic Ray square wave at max frequency (yellow) routed into a 4ms Buffered Mult and into Matrixarchate input 1, and the resulting wave appearing at output A (purple.)

I also just got one of these, intending to primarily use it with video. I haven’t found edge blurring to be a problem visually so far and can’t see any difference between the waveforms with this patch (using Bridge as a buffered multiple), though I’m using a 20MHz analog scope.

One thing I thought would be cool, and seems to work quite well, is since LZX output impedances are all roughly the same, you can use this as a matrix mixer by shorting multiple outputs together – passively mixing like this can be nice because you can e.g. sum N signals with 0-1V swings and get an output with a 0-1V swing without worrying about clipping, as the “output” is the (weighted) average of all the “inputs”.

I hooked up a vertical ramp -> keyer -> fader patch to A/B compare the horizontal square wave before and after the Matrixarchate, and yeah it’s definitely visible where the blur/shift kicks in but I think what little capture equipment I have is probably not capable of showing it. It’s like 0.5-1 pixel smearing on my display, I may never have noticed it if I hadn’t gone looking. A little vaseline on the lens.